Not enough aldermen showed up to the council’s Public Safety Committee to hold a vote, so Chairman Ald. Ariel Reboyras recessed the hearing until Monday morning. He said he plans to have a vote on Zopp then.

“We were going to have a hearing, but we need members to vote on it,” said Reboyras, 30th. “If I wanted to rush it, I would have done it with two members. I’m not going to do that.”

But Aneel Chablani, advocacy director for the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said putting the Zopp vote off for a couple of more days won’t suffice to give community groups and others a chance to weigh in.

“We’re talking about a meaningful period where the community organizations that have been central to the reform efforts will have an opportunity to come in and share their concerns about independence and political pressure on the board,” Chablani told reporters after the brief meeting. “And so that’s obviously not going to be accomplished during a weekend delay.”

Zopp is a former county and federal prosecutor, corporate executive and head of the Chicago Urban League, who ran a losing Democratic primary campaign for U.S. Senate last year before Emanuel named her deputy mayor. She said Friday that her record speaks for itself and contended that she has been a public figure for long enough that community members are familiar with her.

“If you look at my track record, I was a prosecutor, I prosecuted police officers, I’ve been engaged in police reform, both before I came to the mayor’s office and in the mayor’s office,” she said at a Friday groundbreaking for a new building at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “I think I have the record and background, I think everybody knows that. I’m not new to the public sector.”

The Police Board is a key body in the city’s police reform effort, and reform advocates have argued police discipline should be insulated from the influence of politics. The shortcomings of the police disciplinary system have been a central issue in the nearly two years since the release of video of a white police officer shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.